This present invention relates to a document processing method and a document processing system each using a multiwindow, and in particular, to a document processing method and a document processing system in which a display content of a window established in a display screen is copied into a specified region of another window and which is suitable for generating a document including a patch region.
A display system having a function to display an edited image, a portion of which is obtained by insetting a partial image extracted from another image, is proposed, for example, in a U.S. application Ser. No. 594,690, now U.S. Pat. No. 4,716,404 dated Dec. 29, 1987, by K. Tabata et al. Further, a multiwindow system has been developed recently as an apparatus to support office jobs which has a function to display a plurality of windows on a screen at the same time, to extract a portion of document materials or original data displayed in a window, and to bring the extracted portion into a portion of a new document being generated in another window. A system capable of the document processing accomplished by an extracting and insetting operation of another original data as described above has been described e.g. in the "Nikkei Communication", Feb. 10, 1986, pp. 69-103, the "Nikkei Communication" being issued every second week from the Nikkei McGraw Co., Ltd.
In the multiwindow system, application programs are assigned to the respective windows to enable the users to concurrently access a plurality of programs. Each program, assuming a window assigned thereto as a dedicated terminal equipment, outputs a processing result in response to an instruction from the user. Consequently, in a case where a document comprising, for example, a text region and graph region is desired, a character input operation on the text region is achieved in a first window by use of a first program having a document processing function and a desired graph is subsequently drawn in a second window by using a second program including a function to automatically draw graph from numeric data inputted thereto; finally, a particular region (copy source region) including the graph specified in the second window is extracted and is moved into a specified region (copy destination region) in the first window, which enables to generate a document having a complex content at a high speed by effectively using the functions of the respective programs.
However, in the prior art multiwindow system, for an update of the content of the copy destination region of the document generated by combining the processing results of the plurality of application programs, even when the sizes and position of the copy source and destination regions are unchanged, the sizes and the positions are required to be specified for each copy operation. As a consequence, when a document processing is achieved by combining the contents generated in another window in a trial-and-error fashion, the operator must repeatedly effect a complex operation.
Moreover, in the example above, after the second window in cleared in the screen, if the content of the copy region to the first window is required to be changed, the operator must achieve a procedure to restore the copy source region by setting the window, initiating the second program, and reading the previously used data from the file.